Humphry Davy

Davy’s close friends Coleridge and Southey, also Roget, participated in his laughing-gas experiments. Banks, Cavendish and Thompson offered him help in his electro-chemical researches. He wrote up Wedgwood’s photographic experiments and climbed Helvellyn with Wordsworth, Southey and Scott. Faraday became his assistant after he temporarily blinded himself, Davy claiming him as his greatest scientific discovery; on a two-year European journey, they visited Ampère, Hachette, Cuvier, Berthollet, Volta and the de la Rives, among others. Coleridge said he went to Davy’s lectures to increase his stock of metaphors.